Tuesday, June 28, 2016

SISTERS ran for six seasons in the nineties. It was quirky and fun for several years. The acting was good and it wasn't set in New York City, (Illinois instead) always a plus for me. The writers managed to give each sister a distinct personality. Wish someone would stream it. DVD doesn't cut it anymore for those of us without DVD players.You can find Ward, Kurtz and Kalembier still around but Julianne Philips has mostly disappeared.

Monday, June 27, 2016

I am putting my house back together for the third time since moving last year. Now I know I have too many books despite giving hundreds away several times a year. But I also have too many pictures to hang on the wall, picture albums and loose pictures, downloads of various articles, pottery, quilts (I made them back in the seventies, pens. And so much more. Not matter how often I divest myself of these items, they always come back,
Aside from books, what do you have too much of?

*Starred Review* Nature’s miracles are often small and hard to
capture, but in a syncopated harmony of text and image, Frost and Lieder
manage to depict tiny moments as seen through a bug’s-eye-view of the
world. The quiet poem begins with an invitation to “Step gently out”
and, from there, to observe a blade of grass. This may seem a dull
activity, but it turns out to be full of wonder: a cricket leaps and
sings; a spider spins a silken web; a firefly flashes through the
evening air. The soothing, meditative language bursts with beautiful
imagery that begs to be read aloud—“The / creatures / shine with /
stardust. / Then they’re / splashed / with / morning / dew”—and the
photographs, taken at close range, magnify wings in flight and dewdrops
on webs. Praying mantises and moths may not be known for their
loveliness, but in the collaborators’ capable hands, they are beautiful.
Moving from day to night, the poem makes for a soothing bedtime lullaby
that includes a reminder to children about the book’s small creatures:
“In song and dance / and stillness, / they share the world / with you.”
Preschool-Grade 1. --Ann Kelley

Although the prose is amazing, the photos are even more so. Done in Rick Lieder's backyard. His newest one is on fireflies. Simply gorgeous.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Two divorced women and their three children join forces. Lots of good conversations about feminism, including the one in this trailer. Jane Curtin and Susan St. James had good chemistry. Better than most romantic pairings.It was on TV for five years from 1984-89 and dealt with the topics of that day: single mothers, feminism. When the kids grew up, the story lost its main thrust: balancing single-motherhood and a career. Although the woman had male companions, it was always about the two of them.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan recently introduced the idea of rebuilding
Detroit around the concept of the 20-minute neighborhood, where folks
can walk or bike to everything they need outside of work.
Great idea, but could it work in Detroit?
For
those who have never heard of it, a 20-minute neighborhood is an
active, safe, walkable, convenient, predominantly residential
neighborhood. A place where people can get most of their day-to-day
goods and services — shopping with good food, access to transit, parks
and schools — within a 20-minute walk. According to the Portland Plan of
2009, 20-minute neighborhoods have three basic characteristics: a
walkable environment, destinations that support a range of basic living
needs and residential density. Or as they say in real estate:
“rooftops.”
This concept is certainly not new. Before the turn of
the 20th Century, before the automobile, the “walkable neighborhood” was
the norm. And even in the 1920s the idea of the “neighborhood unit,”
where most services would be available within about a quarter of a mile,
was the basic building block of the U.S. suburb. But how things change.
By
WWII, and the emergence of widespread car ownership, the city was being
stretched by lower and lower density development. By the 1950’s the
auto-dependent suburbs were on over-drive and the very thought of
walkability was far from the minds of the developers or the home buyers.
The two or even three-car garage was far more important than the
sidewalk, or the neighborhood store. Need a quart of milk or a pound of
sugar? No problem. Jump into the car, scoot down the cul-de-sac and
drive three miles to the A&P or Kroger.
But for many that
suburban idyll is changing and the new home buyers, the millennials,
want to find a tighter, more dense, more interconnected and certainly
more walkable place to put down their roots. And the mayor sees that
sort of place, that authentic urban neighborhood, as a model for
Detroit’s recovery.
Can this work? Perhaps. Where there’s existing
residential density, close to some shops, a local park and perhaps an
elementary school then the Portland conditions will hold. So the mayor’s
initial target neighborhoods: L6 (Livernois and McNichols), Southwest
Detroit and West Village on the east side might work. But the key to
extending the concept is density. Are there enough households, with
sufficient disposable income, to sustain the shops, the local services?
Are there enough children to keep the school open and thriving?
Herein
lies the rub. The 20-minute neighborhood needs a residential density of
somewhere between 15 and 20 households per acre to support local
retail. Outside of the downtown/Midtown corridor and a select number of
more dense, occupied neighborhoods, most of Detroit has a lower
residential density.
So is the idea dead on arrival? I’d argue not
so, but Detroit’s neighborhood renewal needs to be packaged and sold in
a different way. Twenty-minute walking access to shops and transit will
likely take a while so the benefits of upgrading existing vacant homes,
of filling empty lots and building some medium-density housing needs to
be sold on other, noncommercial, benefits of density. The benefits of
walkability and improved health and well-being should be highlighted.
Sustainability, recreating a sense of place and building a safe,
welcoming community for the young and old alike can all be promoted as
authentic advantages of bringing density back to Detroit.
When the rooftops come back, shops and service are not far behind.Robin Boyle is a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University.

Does your nearest city offer this option? Is there any planning going on for the desire of younger people to live this way. Detroit is a sprawling city with large areas vacated for various reasons. Downtown has not been a place where people chose to live until very recently. What is your nearest city like?

Friday, June 17, 2016

Sarah Water's THE LITTLE STRANGER is one of my favorite ghost stories.

Here is Sarah Water's Ten Favorite Ghost Stories

The Monkey's Paw" by WW Jacobs
This
is one of the most anthologised of all ghost stories, and its "be
careful what you wish for" message has become one of the clichés of the
genre. Every time I read it, I realise how economical it is: we never
see the son who, summoned up by the diabolical power of the monkey's
paw, has dragged his mangled body out of its grave and back to his
parents' house; we only hear his baleful knocks at the door. But it's
the anticipation that makes it so hair-raisingly good.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
This
story of a beautiful revenant and her fascination with teenage girls is
about a vampire rather than a ghost, but it can't be beaten. Most
memorable is the "very strange agony" into which her voluptuous wooing
plunges the story's unworldly narrator: "Sometimes it was as if warm
lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat .
. ."

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
As
far as I know, none of Ishiguro's fiction is actively supernatural, but
his novels have a brilliant strangeness to them, which makes reading
them always an unnerving experience. Here his Nagasaki-born narrator has
become so detached from her own traumatic past, she has effectively
turned it into someone else's life. As in many great ghost stories, the
result is a tightly controlled narrative surface, with half-glimpsed,
terrifying depths.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This
is a brilliant depiction of a woman's decent into insanity. But the
room in which its unnamed protagonist slowly loses her wits is
definitely a "haunted" one: the ghosts are other women, trying furiously
but fruitlessly to "shake the bars" of the claustrophobic patterns in
which they are trapped.

"The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link
All
of Link's stories are wonderfully odd and original. Some are also quite
scary - and this, from her collection Stranger Things Happen, is very
scary indeed. It's the story of 10-year-old twin girls in a haunted
American mansion, being instructed by an enigmatic babysitter just what
it means to be "dead".

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The definitive haunted house story, and one of the novels that inspired a fabulously scary film, the 1963 The Haunting (1963).

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
I'm
not really much of a James fan, but I think this has to be on my list,
if only because the story - of a lonely governess whose charges may or
may not be being haunted by the ghosts of wicked servants - has been
such an influential one. As far as chills go, I actually prefer the two
films for which it provided the inspiration: the 1961 The Innocents,
with a fragile Deborah Kerr, and The Others (2001), with a demented
Nicole Kidman.

"The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen
In
many of her novels and stories, Bowen beautifully captures the eerie
atmosphere of wartime London, with its blitzed, abandoned houses. In
this story, a middle-aged woman tries to evade an assignation with the
sinister soldier fiancé, lost to her many years before.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Watching
a BBC adaptation of this several Christmases ago, I got so frightened, I
was sick. Admittedly, I had eaten a lot of Christmas pudding - but
Hill's story is terrifying, a classic of the genre. The "woman with the
wasted face", made so malevolent by the loss of her own infant that she
destroys the children of others, is a fantastic creation.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
"Not
a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead
Negro's grief," one of the characters points out, when Sethe, the
novel's protagonist, suggests fleeing from the spiteful spirit
inhabiting her home. One of the great fictional studies of slavery and
its scars, Beloved is also a sublime literary ghost story: a meditation
on the ways in which individuals and communities - an entire nation -
can be haunted by the violence and injustice of the past.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

I read about 150 pages of this book. A friend and I had the idea we would revisit a classic that we had read as teenagers. I loved it then but perhaps my love of it was associated with the movie version with Natalie Wood.

The novel now seemed overwritten. Every issue presented went on for many pages of dialog. I like dialog but sparser dialog. Also Marjorie seemed uninteresting as well as unlikable. Superficial. I don't mind unlikable characters If they do interesting things. She did not. At least not in the first 150 pages.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Violet Hart is a photographer trying to cobble out a
life for herself in the womb-like interior of Detroit. Nearing
forty, she’s keenly aware that the opportunity for artistic recognition is on the wane. When her lover, Bill Fontenel, a Detroit mortician, needs a
photograph of a body, she agrees to takes the picture. Violet is energized by the subject matter, and persuades Bill
to allow her to take pictures of some of his other “clients." She is able to interest a gallery owner in mounting a show.
Violet is overly confident because dead bodies are
commonplace in Detroit. This project
soon places Violet in the position of having to
strain to meet her quota.
As time runs out, how will Violet come
up with enough subjects to photograph without losing her soul or her
life in the process?

Should you want to read SHOT IN DETROIT, here are some places to order it. Or come to my book launch at the Huntington Woods Library on June 22nd where Book Beat will be on hand. Or Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor on June 25th (with Bryon Quertermous).

Monday, June 13, 2016

Afraid there is going to be a bit of this over the next week. So for those who can never get enough of me, ( a small list since my mom died) check out ONE BITE AT A TIME. Thanks, Dana King. You ask great questions-ones you can't hide from.

Patricia Abbott (pattinase)

This blog is ten years old this summer.
My very first comment was from Todd Mason, responding to a test post. I had an earlier blog. Can't remember why it ended. But this one is ten.

I'm supposed to be reading Lonesome Dove for my book group. Why am I so
resistant to reading assigned books? Because in this case it's 847 pages
about cowboys. I read the first page and threw it on the floor. I start
about ten times the number of books I finish. Is this normal?I finish almost every movie though. Almost.Story
"Hole in the Wall" accepted in Hardluck Stories' Psycho noir issue.
That means three in the fall: Murdaland (The Scarecrow), The Spinetinger
(Roundabout) and now this. Perhaps one in Detroit Noir too (The
Snakecharmer). Perhaps.

At the height of this blog, I got upwards of 40 comments some days. Even more. Now it is never more than five or ten. I think the days of blogs is nearly over. Facebook put the nail in its coffin. I used to read 20 or so blogs a day. Now just a half dozen most days. I miss those days but Facebook allows other things. People can talk more easily there. I have over a thousand friends on facebook.

Friday, June 10, 2016

I saw A BIGGER SPLASH recently and I liked it enough to search out the original French film from 1969 LA PISCINE. There may be more sensual movies but I've not seen them. Nearly the entire film centers around a swimming pool. Romy Schneider and Alain Delon play the couple, whose ideal world is turned upside down by the arrival of her ex-lover and his daughter. (Ronet and Birkin). The remake is better in some aspects, the original in others. Both are gorgeous but the original much more so. Tilda Swinton is too androgynous to be a good Romy Schneider stand-in IMHO. And no one is more gorgeous than Alain Delon.

I remember loving this book when I read it in 1987 or so. And yet, I am not sure I ever read another book by him after this one, his first. Here is an amazon synopsis. As commenters note, it bears some resemblance to Daughter of Time in its examination of an historical event. If I ever get a chance, I will read it again.

"At a lush villa on the sun-soaked island of Madeira, Martin Radford is
given a second chance. His life ruined by scandal, Martin holds in his
hands the leather-bound journal of another ruined man, former British
cabinet minister Edwin Strafford. What’s more, Martin is being offered a
job—to return to England and investigate the rise and fall of
Strafford, an ambitious young politician whose downfall, in 1910, is as
mysterious as the strange deaths that still haunt his family.

Martin
is intrigued by Strafford’ s story, by the man’s overwhelming love for a
beautiful suffragette, by her inexplicable rejection of him and their
love affair’s political repercussions. But as he retraces Strafford’s
ruination, Martin realizes that Strafford did not fall by chance; he was
pushed. Suddenly Martin, who has not cared for many people in his life,
cares desperately—about a man’s mysterious death and a family’s
terrible secret, about a love beyond reckoning and betrayal beyond
imagining. Most of all Martin cares because the story he is uncovering
is not yet over—and among the men and women still caught in its web,
Martin himself may be the most vulnerable of all…."

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

First, thanks to
Patti for this opportunity. She’s been such a positive influence on my writing
and attitude toward it I’m always flattered when she gives me her little corner
of the Internet for a few minutes.

A Dangerous Lesson is officially the fourth book of my Nick
Forte series, though the key idea comes from my first attempt to write a novel.
It was a Forte story—the character pre-dates any thoughts I had of
publication—with what I thought was an interesting twist. A well-known
psychiatrist created a revolutionary treatment for drug abusers that relies
heavily on hypnosis. The doctor kills his mistress and hypnotizes one of his
patients into thinking he did it while under the influence of drugs, going so
far as to leave the kid, stoned and passed out, in the vicinity of the victim’s
home. I called the book Guilty Conscience.
(Joe Clifford tells me it’s improper to italicize the titles of unpublished
books.)

I haven’t look at
Guilty Conscience in years, so I can’t say much about the caliber of writing it
contains. That’s probably a mitzvah,
given how much I’ve learned since then. I did like the story, and an agent
showed at least some interest.

I still had faint
hopes something might come of it when things fell apart between my second wife
and me and divorce proceedings began. Among her laundry list of requests was
10% of anything I ever made from Guilty Conscience. This struck me as a bit
much, as her entire contribution to the book was to mention there was no
terrain in Chicago where one scene could have taken place, and that the top cop
is the superintendent and not the commissioner. (Or the other way round.) This led
to the easiest negotiation of the settlement: I told my lawyer to get something
in return, we agreed to the 10%, and I resolved never to look at the book
again. So there.

The idea of
planting memories stuck with me. Several years later I was noodling around on
the Internet and came across Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, who was teaching at Cal
Irvine and considered the leading authority on the effects of hypnosis on
memory. A bit of a controversial figure, she raised a counterargument to the
use of detecting past child abuse by showing memories could as easily be
created as recalled.

On the faculty of a
state university, her email was public record, so I pinged her. A few messages
back and forth resulted in a phone call that she began with a warning of how
little time she had and lasted almost an hour. She was enormously helpful and
provided ideas I would never have thought of while cautioning me not to make
too much of some things. Not to say I did everything
exactly as she suggested, but that’s what novelists do: use facts to make shit
up.

So A Dangerous Lesson is what grew from the
rotting corpse of Guilty Conscience. I buried the idea, gave it a little light
and water from time to time, and an entirely new and different story grew from
the same seed. One I own completely.

Monday, June 06, 2016

I was thin until age forty when I 1) quit smoking 2) developed an underactive thyroid 3) well, who knows.
When I look at my friends who are thin (and they pretty much divide evenly among the woman as being very thin and needing to lost 25 pounds or so) the thin ones don't seem to follow the same pattern..

1) Friend One-is lucky in his metabolism. He can eat pretty much what he wants and not gain weight. He thinks he pays attention to what he eats, but I have seen no signs of that. His parents were thin, he inherited those genes.

2) Two friends only eat one meal a day and its late at night. Five days a week that one meal is a salad with chicken for protein. On the weekend, they have the largest meal I have ever seen. I couldn't begin to eat half of it. So they seem to have stomachs that are able to expand two times a week.

3). This friend never eats anything fattening. No cookies, cake, carbs, no bread, pasta, rice etc. And I mean never.

4) This friend orders a meal and only eats perhaps 1/4 of it and packs the rest up. This friend is also a fussy eater and can rule out most food because of that.

Do you have a thin friend? How does that friend maintain the weight? What's the secret?

I will say one thing about all of these friends. They are obsessed with being thin. Maybe that's the real key. It has to be the primary goal in your life.

Friday, June 03, 2016

Thanks to Todd Mason for manning the ship while I was away. Hope everyone will read a Rex Stout book for next month's special edition. Also if I was supposed to write something for your blog for A SHOT IN DETROIT (I remember Bill's) please let me know. Gremlins have made off with my list.

From the archives, Charlie Stella reviews John Fetridges' LET IT RIDE

Charlie Stella is the author of six novels about the New York underworld, most recently TOMMY RED.

John McFetridge’s Let It Ride presents a lot of subplots to keep readers engaged.A
husband and wife, fresh from a swing party, are mistakenly whacked by a
hit man while in a semi-compromising position in their car while
driving home from a swing party.The hit man could only see the driver (so yous figure out the position).A couple of veterans used to hustling drugs and guns out of Afghanistan are joined in Toronto where one of them,

JT
(a Canadian Afghanistan veteran) is about to earn his full patch
(become a made man, so to speak) for the gang run by Richard Tremblay
(another subplot), a full patch who seeks the ultimate power (cappo di tutti cappi, so to speak). Vernard “Get” McGetty is the Detroit half of the connection and always looking for something better.After
delivering some hardware up to JT in Toronto, he’s shown the ropes of
the motorcycle gang world (and notices how many of the motorcyclists
drive SUV’s) … JT shows him how they operate and it is impressive.

There’s
also Sunitha, an Indian "rub and tug" (hand job) hooker with a second
gig heading a small band of women who rob massage parlors of the almost
rich and not so famous.She wants more and is ambitious enough to get it.Once she hooks up with Get (after JT takes him for some relief), she sees gold in her future.

Literally gold.

There’s
also a subplot that has to do with the law trying to solve the couple
murdered in their car … Maureen McKeon is cop no longer satisfied with
her home life, her husband or young infant ... and she’s drinking again.

There are also those pesky, but not so powerful eye-talians out and about; with a subplot within their story as well.

Hookers and hit men abound … the names of the characters sub-title each chapter so there’s no reason to get lost.Let It Ride is chock full of references to the author the author of Let it Ride is most often compared to (say that three times fast).The name Elmore Leonard and several of his works make a few appearances, in tribute, I suspect.The
references work well, as does the writing in this exciting page turner
from the Toronto Bills very own crime fiction specialist.

The
bit about full patches … essentially, a Full Patch = Made Man … north
of the border there are motorcycle gangs that operate much the same way
traditional organized crime does (or did); those seeking full honors in
the program need to prove themselves over time … earn their stripes (so
to speak) and then be approved by a board (of sorts) before they can
become full patch members. There
are rules one needs to abide along the way (or at least not get caught
breaking them) and some are pretty similar to those the Italian-American
mob are supposed to abide by.

Like don’t screw the wife of a made guy/full-patch and get caught without expecting to meet your maker.It’s one of the rules tested by JT …

No spoilers here … but know that McFetridge does very good work.He teaches as well as entertains.Let It Ride offers convincing snapshots of the different characters who inhabit our world.Like
them or not, their choices are much more understandable by the novel’s
several endings (each character has one, whether open ended or not).I never imagined motorcycle gangs were so powerful until I saw a documentary on the subject.It was chilling.Let It Ride
was a reminder of just how powerful a group of determined sociopaths
can be in a society unprepared for the violence and protected by law
enforcement as corruptible as politicians.

Take a journey with this character driven novel of crime that takes place north of the border.You’ll meet interesting people at each turn; characters that both frighten and intrigue.Let It Ride
is the character driven page turner we expect from McFetridge and we’re
always glad to see some of his characters from prior works appear.Comparisons to the master from Detroit are valid.North of the boarder, McFetridge’s people inhabit the gritty world it is better to read about than taste first hand.Let It Ride lets us do that. An intriguing novel about opportunistic characters seizing their day.Carpe Diem indeed.McFetridge is the real deal.

Thursday, June 02, 2016

At least once a day, and certainly in bed at night, Barry Johnson reviewed the details of his final race. He knew it was a bad idea--more than one shrink had told him to recite poetry or the characters on The Sopranos instead--but it had become unavoidable. Like saying the rosary was for a devout Catholic. His bike had been only seven months old but well conditioned from many weekend treks. He knew the bike. A dark-red Monster, it handled all terrains. He'd saved up for the bike since high school--every dime he could lay his hands on for six years.It was his second bike but a lot more powerful than the first one, a used Honda he bought from the mechanic at the corner gas station--a junkyard purchase--but what else could he expect at that price? And not being a gear head, he had to rely on the guy's skill and say so. A sprocket here, a crank shaft there, a cam chain shiny new, then finally something resembling a bike appeared. He'd never taken to the ersatz Honda--always seemed like the piece of junk it was. Even the paint job was second-rate. The Ducati was awesome--he like that it wasn't a rice burner--and the chicks flocked to him when he parked it outside a bar or at a track. Stroking the bike like it was a big red dick, asking him for rides. He took it out wheneven he could find the time, raced it twice before the Enduros up near the Dunes. After six months of a Kenpo Karate class, he felt physically prepared. Calm and in command. Had a few rallies under his belt, but this would be his first time-card test. The bike had been tuned at the dealer the day before. It wasn't necessary, but that was the way he felt about it. He also took special care since he was a novice compared to the grayheads who'd been racing for decades. Fat men, whose asses bulged over their aftermarket gel seats, looked his bike over and shook their heads. He'd only taken up motocross two years earlier--but he's always been a demon for speed. First skateboards as a kid, then stock cars, but only briefly, Cages made him itchy, trapped. That turned out to be the final irony, didn't it? Back then, a time that seemed very long ago now, it was as if the car drove him--he never really felt one with it. So he moved on to bikes. Like leaning into a turn, feeling each shift in his stomach, vibrations in his calves. And the road beneath him, that was part of it too. He worked a shit job that paid okay because work didn't matter. He came alive on his bike--loved riding fast. Taking off into the unknown--depopulated neighborhoods in Detroit that were quiet as cemeteries, dirt roads in the midlands, or sandy trails far up north. Racing required a series of rapid decisions, and he was good at making them. Had the instinct somehow. Loved the sound of the motors, the smell of the oil, gas, grass, dirt, hearing the din, and finally the roar of the crowd. It was his sport. Until it wasn't. It'd had been completely random--what happened that day--which made it both harder and easier to take--depending on his level of despair. Someone's broken headlight scattered glass on the track--nobody even knew the fuckin' thing was broken--and his front tire caught a piece, actually several pieces, someone told him later. He'd tried to lay it down when he saw how things were, tried to bring the bike under control, but the tire shredded after a few rotations and he smashed into a wall. First the bike hit the concrete with such force it vibrated uncontrollably, and then his body smacked the wall too, catapulting above the bike--as high as ten feet maybe. A few more feet and he might have cleared the wall entirely, landing safely on the other side. The arbitrariness of it all--that was the hardest thing to keep dwelling on later. "Don't move," someone kept telling him. No fuckin' chance of that. If he had a body after that, he didn't know it. Seemed to be floating above it all --above the track and himself--wondering why there was no pain. But they, whoever they were, kept repeating the words "don't move" for hours it seemed and he obeyed. Obeyed without trying to because he couldn't have moved if it meant his life. Not even his head or arms at first. Helicopters, ambulances, wheelchairs--these were his new vehicles. Hospitals, rehab centers, and finally home--his new cages. His parents' house, redesigned in his absence, was a place for his chair, his medical equipment. He took over their room, their lives. Home. Four wallks, almost all the time now--the ultimate cage. He knew the other guys had fitted vans--custom deals--but to go where? Shopping a the mall, out to Applebees, a movie, a race. No, none of it. This is what he dreamed every night. That he climbed on the Monster, drove miles up north with his old girlfriend, Michelle, flew into the ozone or whatever lay beyond the cliffs. He could live with that. Or rather die with it. Soaring and free, his choice. But that wasn't going to happen so he sat out on the porch or in the backyard. Once a kid going down the street had asked, "What happened to you, Mister?" "Afghanistan," he hollered back.He never felt the bite of the mosquito, but his thigh swelled up. His parents, then his doctor, then the hospital staff looked at it. Doctors said the insect might have bitten him ten times. never felt a bite, an itch. Nothing. Fuck. It took a few weeks to die though and it was still the crash he visited in his head. Dying seemed related to that--not to some dumb-ass bug. In his head, he was back on his bike, Michelle holding on tight, sailing into the ether off the sandstone cliffs of Picture Rock. Wind in his face felt so good, her breath on his neck even better. Soaring above all of it.

About Me

Patricia Abbott is the author of more than 125 stories that have appeared online, in print journals and in various anthologies. She is the author of two print novels CONCRETE ANGEL (2015) and SHOT IN DETROIT (2016)(Polis Books). CONCRETE ANGEL was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity Award in 2016. SHOT IN DETROIT was nominated for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award in 2017. A collection of her stories I BRING SORROW AND OTHER STORIES OF TRANSGRESSION will appear in 2018.